widowers wood fiction
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A TALE OF FOUR MONSTERS
A TALE OF FOUR
MONSTERSBoard Games aren’t known for their stories—but Privateer
Press is. We love adding great storytelling to everything we do.
Each of the seven scenarios in Widower’s Wood advances an
ongoing storyline that reveals more about the setting, thevillainous plot, and our heroic monsters trying to save their
home. Crafted by Privateer’s own Director of Business and
frequent sta author Will Shick and Iron Kingdoms creator
Matthew D. Wilson, the Widower’s Wood story is an epic tale
told within the framework of a board game, a story that would
be right at home on the bookshelf alongside our Skull Island
eXpeditions novels. To give you a taste of the adventure that
awaits you, you can read the prologue to the entire tale here!
PROLOGUEPurple tentacles break the surface of the pond, thrashing wildly
in a desperate attempt to escape the constricting net. In the
murky depths below, Olo grips a rock with both webbed feetas he strains against the ailing swamp squid, maneuvering
the net into position with his four-ngered hand. Just as the
pan-sized eye of the squid comes into view, Olo thrusts forward
with his shing spear, piercing the black pupil and driving the
spear deep into the creature’s brain. Immediately, the thrashing
stops, the squid’s tentacles now as listless as the waterweeds
gently brushing against Olo’s legs.
Clambering up a muddy embankment, Olo drags the horse-
sized leviathan ashore. His speckled green skin glistens in
the dappled afternoon light, the water sliding o in beads.
Olo smiles, wide lips stretching across his frog-like face. It is a
good catch, he thinks; his customers will be pleased. Bringing a
swamp squid in before it discharges its ink sac takes great skill,and the full gland will fetch him better trades with the local
bonegrinder. Everyone will be satised: the farrow tribe will
feast on this beast tonight, and Olo will return home rich with
all the wares his mate desires and a bag full of baubles for his
polliwogs, too.
Five pairs of bulbous eyes appear at the edge of the water.
One by one, ve tiny green heads bob up and down, chirping
enthusiastically in the tongue of the croaks, praising their
father for his accomplishment. Olo’s vocal sac expands
proudly, lling with air before he warbles an aectionate
reply. What ne boys, he thinks. Swift swimmers and strong
as tadpoles could be. Soon, they’ll be hopping around on all
fours, ready to join Olo and his beloved Burita in the treetopnest they built together.
Despite its name, Widower’s Wood is a good home, far from
the ghting that plagues their native Shattered Spine Islands
and just wild enough that it only rarely sees the wayward
human from the nearby city of Corvis. Here, Olo can raise his
boys. And one day, this lonely pond wit h one small nest might
be a v illage.
Atop a at rock, Olo slices o the squid’s tentacles with a sharp,
obsidian blade and packs them tightly into a large burlap bag
Cutting through the tough hide protecting the great mollusk’s
organs, he reaches within its body cavity to careful ly extract the
full ink sac, which he gently places in a padded, oilskin pouch
he can carry around his neck.
Seeing him about to depart, Burita calls from the window, high
up in the nest of woven sticks and rope, urging him to returnquickly; dinner will be waiting. He hoists the heavy bag o
squid meat over his shoulder and waves back to his beloved
before setting o to peddle his catch. He goes with nothing less
than a spring in his step and a whistle on his wide froggy lips.
•••
Olo tightens the grip on his knife as the sound grows nearer—a
clumsy, uneven shuing, like a wounded animal staggering
through the thick reeds. At last, whatever is producing the
ruckus is nearly upon him. Olo braces himself, tensing his long
limbs, ready to strike, then relaxes in visible relief as a long
maw full of jagged teeth breaks through the wall of cattails.
“Oy, Sheldon!” Olo chirps cheerfully, rocking quickly from onewebbed foot to the other in the manner of the croaks to greet
a friend.
Sheldon snaps his scaly jaws together and squints his reptil ian
eyes, looking Olo up and down as if trying to recal l who or wha
has called his name. “Ahh, the croaker,” he nally rasps, using
the more common term for Olo’s kind.
The gatorman is thin for his kind, bordering on feeble. His
head twitches nervously, and his eyes dart anxiously left and
right, high and low, as if he expects to discover danger in all
directions. Olo smiles in an eort to conceal his sadness for
his friend. The fates had been cruel to this gatorman, aicting
him with an incurable wasting disease and a neurotic aversionto dark water, which should otherwise be his natural habitat
He was an outcast among the local gatormen tribes, left to die
miserable and alone.
Olo opens his bag and produces a thick length of squid tentacle
“Here, my friend. You need to eat.”
Despite his own maladies, the gatorman has been skilled in
the natural cures and remedies of the region, which he spends
his days rooting for. On more than one occasion, he has shared
his wisdom, if not a comforting treacle or poultice, with Olo
and Burita, who are both relatively new to these parts. Most
of the region’s non-gatormen enclaves are exclusive and wan
nothing to do with the sickly creature, but for a few of the
swamp’s residents who have no issues with his demeanor that’s
so radically dierent from most gatormen, he is perceived as a
bit of a country doctor, if not also a bit bumbling.
Sheldon—the name Olo calls him by, unable to pronounce his
full gatorman name—eyes the fresh meat suspiciously, then
snatches it with one trembling claw, nearly fumbling it to the
ground before hurling it into his gorge.
“Yesss. Thank’ee, croaker. You’re a right mate.” The words grind
from his quivering gullet.
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Olo oers him more of the squid meat, but Sheldon holds up one
palsied claw. Olo puts it away. “Where are you bound, Sheldon?
It’s been a dozen rains since I’ve seen you.”
The gatorman heaves slightly, his abdomen gurgling. “Here.
There. Nowhere ssspecic.” Sheldon’s squinty eye wanders
to the tip of a long, crooked sta he carries, one that Olo only
notices for the rst time. Tied to its top are small animal skulls,
feathers and other odd fetishes, looking more like trappings ofa shaman than those of a frai l, old, true hunter.
“Burita’s making a stew tonight. Join us, please, Sheldon. You
can meet the boys.”
“Boysss?” The gatorman’s quivering suddenly stops and both
eyes x Olo with a quizzical stare.
“They hatched after the new moon. Five of them!” Olo beams.
“You won’t believe how quickly they’re growing.”
“Five, you sssay? And Burita?” Sheldon smacks his gums
and quickly tallies Olo’s offspring on one trembling hand,
growing visibly agitated after repeatedly running out of
claws to count on.
“They’ll be delighted to see you, Sheldon. I’m certain of it.” Olo
hoists his bag over his shoulder. “I’ll be right behind you after I
deliver this catch to the farrow camp.”
The gatorman freezes, his throat rattling as he chokes up a
small, chitinous tooth from a squid sucker. “Farrow camp? That
one, back there?” He snaps his long jaws in the direction from
which he came.
“I won’t be long,” Olo calls over his shoulder, marching forward
through the reeds. “But don’t wait on me to eat.”
Sheldon’s tail swishes sporadically, attening cattails on either
side of him. “Wait? I don’t wait for nuthin. Not anymore,” he
mutters, already tromping speedily through the thicket, hisfetish sta jangling with every uneven step.
•••
Olo drops his bag and kneels beside the motionless farrow. He
places two of his sucker-tipped ngers to her neck, searching
below her coarse hair for a pulse. He exhales in relief. Her heart
still beats somewhere within her muscle-bound mass. The same
cannot be said for any of the other farrow in the camp.
Like trees laid low by a storm, a dozen of the boar-headed
warriors lay dead—even the bonegrinder Olo had hoped would
trade for the squid ink. Eviscerated, their entrails strewn upon
the ground, their tongues cut out, and their eyeballs plucked
from their skulls, every farrow had met the same grisly end.
This hadn’t been a battle, the likes of which occurred from time
to time between the various wild species that called Widower’s
Wood home. This had been a massacre.
“Agata,” Olo whispers, unable to detect any reaction behind
the heavy steel mask strapped over the farrow’s tusked muzzle.
“Agata, can you—”
Before he can nish, a metal-shod hand shoots past the loose
skin of his vocal sac and clamps vise-like around his esophagus.
The farrow warrior slams Olo to his back, clambering atop him
and crushing his ribs under her armored bulk. Spittle ies from
the steel gr ill encasing her snout, and she snorts rabidly.
“Agata KILL!”
Olo writhes, gasping for air, clawing futilely at the
slaughterhouser’s trunk-like forearms. Her grip tightens, and
his eyes bulge from their protruding stalks.
Just as his vision begins to blur, Olo’s hand nds the oilskin
satchel around his neck. Fumbling it open, Olo squeezes the
bag, bursting the swamp squid ink gland within. Black ichor
explodes across the farrow’s facemask, owing through the eye
slits and breathing vents. Agata reels back, gagging, ailing
blindly, but her grip on Olo’s throat holds fast.
Pulling his knees up to his chest, Olo braces both webbed feet
against the cast-iron plate covering the farrow’s corpulent
abdomen. With the last ounce of strength he can muster, Olo
kicks, his powerful leg-muscles propelling the massive farrow
in an arc through the air. With a clamor that shakes the woods
around them, the slaughterhouser crashes into a wooden
wagon, smashing it to pieces.
Olo rolls to his feet and hefts his knife, pointing it at the farrow.
“Agata! Stop! It’s me, Olo!”
Retching on the squid ink, the farrow staggers to her feet, her
heavy hooves trampling the remains of a fallen campmate.
Reaching behind her porcine skull, she unbuckles her steel
mask and ings it to the ground. She spits, vomits, and rubs her
eyes until her rage nally subsides.
Casting her stare about the camp, she is suddenly overcome.
She squeals in agony, falls to her haunches, and blubbers
uncontrollably at the sight of her butchered, blinded brethren.
“Agata.” Olo approaches her cautiously, lowering his knife andholding out one four-ngered hand. “What happened here?”
“Too many,” she sobs. “Bokors. Evil hocus-pocus.” She reaches
for the face of her nearest campmate, brushing her hand
over his face to shut the lids of his hollow sockets. “He took
brother’s eyes…”
“Thank the fates you were spared, Agata,” Olo says, kneeling
beside her and placing his hand gently on her bristling spine.
“No spare!” she roars. She grabs her metal mask o the ground
and shakes it at the sky, crying out in anguish. “He not get
Agata mask o!”
Olo knows she would rather have died alongside her kin, that
she regards her survival as nothing more than a cruel joke.
“Who, Agata? Who did this?”
Agata looks straight into Olo’s eyes, her snout furrowing in an
expression of pure hatred. “Bumblehead, hobble-foot, scrawny,
spineless lizard doc. That who.”
The color blanches from Olo’s green skin. He gulps as the
realization kicks him in the pit of his stomach.
“Agata kil l,” she mutters between sobs. But Olo is already racing
for home. She follows him.
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•••
His heart ready to explode in his chest, Olo reaches his
homestead, croaking at the top of his lungs for Burita. Smoke
billows from the wattle nest and ames lick out from the spaces
between the branches and nett ing that hold it together.
In two leaps, Olo bounds up the trunk of the mangrove, twenty
feet to the opening in the nest ’s convex wall. Inside, he nds his
home ablaze, those furnishings and trappings not already onre ung about as if they were scattered in a violent encounter.
He screams for Burita, the ames blistering his wet skin as he
pushes deeper into the nest, searching for his beloved. Finally,
he is forced to retreat, coughing on the smoke. The ames do
not have her, but his heart aches to consider who might.
Olo can barely stand as he staggers away from the burning t ree.
Agata watches him silently, as sorrowful an expression upon
her face as a warthog can manage. Olo shues toward the pond
to collapse by the water’s edge. His hands in the mud, he weeps,
tears owing from his bulging eyes creating ripples over the
glassy surface of the stil l pond.
Then, something catches his eye. A movement—subtle,cautious, deep within the murky water. He cranes forward,
eyes wide, hope swelling in his chest. Beneath the surface, a
pair of familiar beloved eyes peers back. Burita rises slowly to
the surface, her face just breaking the waterline. The sight of a
deep slash across her face causes Olo to gasp, and he reaches
forward, tenderly touching her face with a single nger.
“It will heal,” she says quietly.
Olo’s voice catches in his throat. “The boys?”
One by one, ve little polliwog heads bob to the surface,
chirping softly. Olo’s shoulders slouch in relief, his worst fears
banished in an instant.
“Good thing Sheldon can’t swim,” he says in an attempt to
make light of their grim predicament.
Burita nods. “Good thing.”
Rising to his feet, Olo holds out his hands to her. “Come. We
must nd something to carry the boys in and leave here at once.”
Burita drifts ever so slightly backward in the water. “The boys
cannot travel, Olo. They will not survive being moved overland.
Not yet.”
“But, beloved, he could come back,” he says, glancing back at
the smoldering nest. “And our home…it’s destroyed.”
“This is still our home. I will rebuild our nest,” she says,walking slowly out of the water and placing her webbed hands
on his shoulders. “And you, dear Olo, will make it safe again, as
you always have.”
Gently, she touches her lips to the smooth green skin between
his eyes.
•••
Olo had been a warrior for a time and a skilled sher for even
longer. But he was no tracker. Still, the path of car nage had been
easy enough to follow, and were it not for the plodding hooves
of his traveling companion, Olo believed he might have caugh
up to Sheldon by now.
Agata possessed a fury Olo knew could not even be quenched
by the gatorman’s death. Stil l, her loss had been innitely
greater than his own, and he knew he had no right to ask herto stay back, even if it meant he might travel faster or more
stealthily. She craved revenge, and he wanted a safe place to
raise his family. The solution was the same for both of them
and thus their paths were joined. Two heads of the same beast
as the croak saying went. It weighed upon his heart, but Olo
knew Sheldon could not be allowed to live, not after what he
had done, not after what he had tried to do.
Olo only wished he knew why he had done it at all. The
mist gatorman had never shown signs of being dangerous
particularly as gatormen go. He was nervous and awkward
and sickly, but Olo knew him to be k ind and generous, at leas
when he wasn’t keeping entirely to himself. What could have
caused this murderous rampage? What could compel Sheldon’sgood nature to turn so sharply? Who was aiding him? Perhaps
Olo thinks, there is an explanation, something that might no
warrant the gatorman’s death.
“Brain worms,” Agata snorts, as if reading Olo’s mind. Olo
raises his rubbery eye ridges at her as she adds, “Make gators
cuckoo.”
Olo shrugs, ghting fatigue to stay alert as dusk falls over the
marshy wood.
“Agata hate gators,” the farrow warrior rants in the stilted
common tongue of the region’s humans. As she runs down
a litany of reasons that the only good gatormen are dead
gatormen, Olo nally realizes they have lost Sheldon’s trail.
The evening mists have obscured the damp earth beneath them
and the woods are slowly being consumed by a soupy fog tha
turns everything grey in the little moonlight that manages to
penetrate the forest canopy. Even Olo’s eyes, keen as they are
in the dark, cannot make out more than shadows and shapes
in the brume.
As Olo slows his pace, Agata stops completely. “Frog man lost,”
she says. Brutish as she is, Olo has decided she possesses an
uncommon intuition.
“Not lost,” Olo says, searching the fog. “I’m just not sure which
way to go.”
Agata snorts and hacks at the nearest tree with several mighty
slashes from her bladed gauntlets. “Lost!” she grunts, kicking
the tree with a powerful hoof, landing the blow just above her
weapon’s cuts. With a pop and a crack, the tree topples over
its thunderous crash startling every whip-poor-will for miles
Agata points down the length of the trunk, indicating Olo to
lead the way. “Not lost.”
Olo opens his mouth to protest, but Agata stamps her hoof
and snarls, convincing the croak that he has more to lose by
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disagreeing with her. But he only manages a few uncertain
steps forward before something whizzes over his head.
“Drop your weapons and walk forward slowly,” growls a voice
in the darkness.
Agata howls in rage, but another arrow, as long and thick as
a spear, slices through the fog to strike the earth between the
farrow’s feet.
“Drop them, Agata,” Olo urges quietly, tossing his knife down.
“If he wanted us dead, we would be already.” The farrow looks
at him for several moments, before nally letting her weapons
fall to the ground.
Together, croak and farrow walk cautiously forward, hands
spread apart to mitigate any appearance of hostility. With
each step, their feet sink deeper into the marsh, the cool water
rising to Olo’s knobby knees. A tranquil breeze parts the mist
before them, and Olo sees a wall of rippling muscle. With
bulging biceps and forearms, the wall stretches a bow,
one festooned with spikes and taller than Olo, aiming
its spear-sized arrow directly at the croak’s heart.
Olo recognizes the tracker. He could pass for human
if he were a couple feet shorter, and if he had
anything other than the face of a vicious, predatory
beast. “You are Skarg the Voracious,” Olo says. “We
have traded before.”
The Tharn stands rigid, the bow perfectly still in his
iron grip. “You are loud. You smell of rotting sh
and dead swine. You wake these woods and disturb
my hunt.”
Half-submerged in the marsh just beyond the Tharn are a
trio of dead bog t rog warriors, swamp-dwelling sh-men,
their carcasses so fresh that steam still rises from their
exposed innards. Olo raises his hands. “We humbly begyour pardon, oh Voracious one,” he says, inclining his head.
“We intended no trespass on your hunting grounds.”
Skarg scowls. “This rancid dung heap is not my land. These
are trog waters. Can’t you smell them?”
“You kil l many sh-man,” Agata says, seemingly impressed.
“Not bad.”
The Tharn nally relaxes the bow, throwing back his head
in exasperation. “I did not kill these trogs! Do I, Skarg the
Voracious, look as if I would waste my time on these bottom
feeders?”
Olo crosses his eyes in confusion. “Then what is it youhunt here?”
Skarg clenches his teeth. “I hunt a prey worthy of an
oering to the great Devourer.” Stepping back to provide
an unobstructed view, he gestures with his arrow at
the bog trog corpses. “I hunt whatever did this.”
Walking forward, Olo peers closer at the dead sh-men. Gaping
tongueless mouths, empty eye sockets—the handiwork is all
too familiar.
“Tree was right,” Agata grunts at him.
“Skarg,” Olo says, cocking his frog-like head to one side, “I do
believe we’re all headed in the same direction after all.”
•••
The Tharn halts, bending down to pluck a single blade of grass
from the wet ground. Running the grass across his tongue, he
closes his eyes for a moment, keying to some invisible trace of
his quarry’s passing. He lifts his head and inhales through his
nostrils in short, rapid breaths, seeing with his olfactory senses
as clearly as Olo can with his eyes.
Having chosen a new heading, Skarg strides ahead, pausing only
to remind Olo and Agata for the umpteenth time to move more
silently. This is not a problem for Olo, but for the hefty farrow,
clad in clanking plate armor, suppressing her noise is no small
feat. And her inability to do so is driving Skarg mad.
Skarg’s tracking skills are so great, Olo muses, that thethree of them might actually beat Sheldon to wherever
he is headed, as long as Olo can keep the hotheaded
Tharn from impaling the farrow the next time Agata
erupts in one of her snorting spasms. It has already
taken much persuasion on Olo’s part to convince the
tracker to lead them after Sheldon, and he hopes his
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exaggeration of the gatorman’s physical prowess will not enrage
the Tharn once they nd their quarry. Olo is certain that if Skarg
knew they hunted a sickly gatorman with chronic shakes and
an unnatural fear of the water, the Tharn would likely head in
search of bigger game. And perhaps kill Olo before he left, just
out of spite. Still, something had killed those trogs, and both
Agata and Burita had witnessed Sheldon’s violence. Still, Olo
remains hopeful his exaggerations will turn out to be just that.
Suddenly, the Tharn wheels to face him, plucking an arrow
from his quiver and nocking it on the bowstring in the blink of
an eye. Reexively, both Olo and Agata duck, but the arrow is
aimed at neither of them.
“Show yourself, Blackclad,” Skarg snarls. “I grow t ired of your
games.”
The swamp around them has taken on a warm glow in the
breaking dawn. Kites and thrushes have awakened, chattering
as they feast on nocturnal slugs and insects that are too late
in nding refuge after their nightly foray. Only in the moment
that Skarg reacts does Olo realize those familiar sounds of
morning in the swamp have gone eerily silent. How long ago
this happened, Olo has no idea.
Searching the trail behind them, Olo watches as a twisted
mangrove trunk takes on the form of a cloaked man, his face
shrouded by the cavernous hood pulled over his head. Slowly,
the man approaches, one palm held before him in a gesture
of peace.
“Save your arrows, hunter,” the man says atly. “I am Vaskis
the Knotkeeper, and we are both servants of the Wurm.”
“That does not make us al lies,” growls Skarg, holding his bow
steady.
“True,” the man replies—a member of the druidic cult Circle
Orboros, Olo surmises. Skarg called him a blackclad, which Oloknows means he is a frighteningly powerful mystic. “But the
quarry you seek does make us all ies.”
Olo stands, motioning for Skarg to lower his weapon. He turns
to the blackclad, confused. “Forgive me, but what care does the
Circle have for a bunch of scattered swamp dwellers? We barely
notice each other here most of the time anyway.”
The druid tucks his hands into his voluminous sleeves, and
Olo would swear that he rises o the very ground, if only he
could see the blackclad’s feet beneath his long, dark robes.
“A powerful force grows within these woods. This new witch
doctor threatens to upset the natural order if he is not eliminated
quickly. I have been sent by my order to make sure this occurs.”
“Witch doctor? I don’t think we’re talking about the same
guy,” Olo says, chuckling nervously at the growing intensity
of the druid.
“There is more to your gatorman than meets the eye.”
Olo gulps, his vocal sac undulating quickly, a trait he hates in
himself for the unmistakable way it advertises his fears.
“You are right to be afraid,” the druid continues. “The witch
doctor is not alone. He is gathering an army using the great
magic he commands. I alone can negate the power he wields
but you must rst get me to him.”
“His trail has vanished.” Skarg clears his throat. “Magic.”
Olo jerks his head around, mouth hanging open wide. “What
have we been doing, then?”
“Making noise,” Skarg grimaces, glaring at Agata.
The farrow snorts indignantly, gyrating her bulk to produce a
cacophony of metallic clinks and clangs that echo throughou
the surrounding woods.
Olo’s eyeballs roll back in their protruding sockets. He has little
hope the eclectic band of companions he has gathered migh
survive in the face of mounting danger, but he knows Sheldon
must be stopped, and he knows success will be much more
likely with this company than on his own.
Scanning the area around them, clearer now in the growing
light, he spots a particularly massive mangrove tree, towering
over the surrounding foliage.
“I know this place,” he says, striding o in the direction of the
tree. “Follow me.”
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